Levka#neuroscience #loneliness #dopamine #SocialInteraction
"Why we crave company
Neuroscientists are discovering that spending time with others may be a basic biological necessity, like need for food or water.
To our human eyes, a mouse’s furred face doesn’t betray much emotion. But if you watch the body language of a mouse who’s reunited with one of her sisters after five days in a cage alone, you might suspect you know what she’s feeling.
The formerly isolated mouse chatters in squeaks too high for a human to hear. She follows her sister, crawling beneath the other mouse’s body as if trying to get a hug. She looks like she’s feeling what you or I feel when meeting a long-lost friend or a family member — maybe with more sniffing.
She looks like she’s been lonely.
Loneliness isn’t just for humans, and neither are its harms. Over the past decade or so, some researchers have come to believe that an animal’s craving for the company of others isn’t just a preference, but a basic, deeply held need. When we don’t socialize enough, we feel the lack like hunger or thirst, they say. When we’ve had our fill of togetherness, we feel satisfied or quenched.
The amount of socializing a creature needs may be particular to that species, and even to that individual. Scientists have found within-species social differences in birds, monkeys, fish and even cockroaches.
Among humans, 'you can feel lonely at a party, or you can feel fine alone in your office,' says Kay Tye, a neuroscientist at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in California. Whatever the ideal degree of togetherness, Tye and others think that an animal’s need to balance time alone and time with others represents a kind of homeostasis: an equilibrium that’s critical for survival. Today, they are on a hunt to find where, in the brain, this equilibrium is controlled — and hoping their work will hold dividends for lonely humans.
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Within each species, Clutton-Brock says evolution has probably allowed for a range of personality types around a certain species average. 'There are costs to too much anxiety' about being alone, he says, 'and costs to too little anxiety.' A species may do best with a mix of social styles.
Whatever an animal’s right amount of social activity, research suggests there can be dire consequences to mental and physical health when it’s not met. People who are socially isolated, or feel lonely, die sooner. Poor social connections are linked to heart disease and stroke. Certain female rats, when housed alone, are more likely to develop cancer.
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The scientists hypothesized that other animals, including humans, share this system. Though it’s not easy to test such a thing in people, Tye did team up with a research group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for an experiment in which people sat alone in a room for 10 hours.
Afterward, subjects reported craving social interaction. When they viewed pictures of people laughing together, their brains lit up in the same region as the brains of fasting subjects who viewed pictures of food: an area, also within the brainstem, packed with dopamine neurons that are involved in cravings.
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What’s more, when scientists used a technical trick called optogenetics to artificially activate the separation neurons every time the animals entered a certain chamber, the mice avoided spending time there. That suggested that these brain cells, when activated, give the mice a bad feeling. 'It’s unpleasant to be alone, in the same way it has been shown that it’s unpleasant to be hungry,' says Dulac, who coauthored an overview of social interaction as a fundamental need in the 2026 Annual Review of Neuroscience."
https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/mind/2026/why-we-crave-social-interaction
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